AbstractHistoryArchive Description

Ackland aims to demonstrate the way in which Stead's writings 'simultaneously exploit and subvert the traditions and conventions available to her'. Concentrating on 'The Marionettist', the first of the Salzburg tales, with its recasting of the puppeteer motif, he detects the influence of Hoffmann on Stead; he find the story 'hints at a range of ensuing pre-occupations, and evokes a past imaginative realm that affords one measure of the existential slippages and social developments that have complicated received themes in a modern, increasingly psychoanalytical age.' pp.53-54.

Notes

Includes reference to the influence of E. T. A. Hoffmann and his story 'The Nutcracker and the Mouse King' on Christina Stead.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Appears in:

yJASALJournal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literaturevol.2Margaret Harris
(editor),
2003Z10823142003periodical issue AbstractIncludes a special section: 'Christina Stead Centenary Essays'.2003

Works about this Work

'This paper argues that Christina Stead's short story, 'The Marionettist,' a story from her 1934 collection, The Salzburg Tales, is felt as uncanny. This paper is in part a response to a 2003 paper by Michael Ackland, which traces the debt 'The Marionettist' owes to E.T.A. Hoffmann's writing. This is a debt which, Ackland argues, does not extend to producing uncanny effects. This paper takes a different view, arguing that not only is 'The Marionettist' felt as uncanny, but that it derives its uncanny effects from various sources. Some of these sources correspond to the different classes of uncanny identified by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay, 'The Uncanny.' These classes are the repressed, the surmounted, and the death drive. My reading of Stead's story emphasizes Freud's suggestion that uncanny effects are dependent on timeless, or archaic, processes. In making this point a distinction is made between the content of the processes (for example, what is repressed), and the processes themselves (the act of repressing), and it is argued that only the content is historically susceptible. The paper proposes that this complicates a tendency by recent writers on the uncanny to limit the uncanny to modernity.' (Publication abstract)

'This paper argues that Christina Stead's short story, 'The Marionettist,' a story from her 1934 collection, The Salzburg Tales, is felt as uncanny. This paper is in part a response to a 2003 paper by Michael Ackland, which traces the debt 'The Marionettist' owes to E.T.A. Hoffmann's writing. This is a debt which, Ackland argues, does not extend to producing uncanny effects. This paper takes a different view, arguing that not only is 'The Marionettist' felt as uncanny, but that it derives its uncanny effects from various sources. Some of these sources correspond to the different classes of uncanny identified by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay, 'The Uncanny.' These classes are the repressed, the surmounted, and the death drive. My reading of Stead's story emphasizes Freud's suggestion that uncanny effects are dependent on timeless, or archaic, processes. In making this point a distinction is made between the content of the processes (for example, what is repressed), and the processes themselves (the act of repressing), and it is argued that only the content is historically susceptible. The paper proposes that this complicates a tendency by recent writers on the uncanny to limit the uncanny to modernity.' (Publication abstract)